Bill O’Reilly: He loves to dish it out, but . . .

Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly loves to send “producers” out to do ambush interviews, quite often as punishment to fellow journalists whose publications he dislikes: Former Seattle Post-Intelligencer publisher Roger Oglesby was an early target.

On Wednesday night in Washington, D.C., however, the loud and right-thinking commentator got a dose of his own medicine — and ended up pushing an umbrella at a man who asked him a question.

BillO was leaving the Willard Hotel for a White House holiday reception. A posh fundraiser for Republican presidential candidate (and former Fox pundit) Newt Gingrich was being held at the Willard.

“Mr. O’Reilly, were you at the Gingrich fundraiser?” shouted a man named Branden Lane, in the nation’s capital as part of a group called Wisconsin Jobs Now.

O’Reilly turned and pushed his umbrella into Lane’s high-definition camera. He then wrestled with the umbrella, which went inside out. At the White House gate, O’Reilly tried to get Lane arrested.

The good-natured Lane appeared Thursday night on the TV program “Countdown” with O’Reilly’s nemesis Keith Olbermann. Olbermann took special delight in that the umbrella struggle revealed a carefully combed-over BillO baldspot.

O’Reilly, on his show, tried wit — “I felt like the Penguin on the Batman show” — but ultimately opted for faux martyrdom.

“This guy could have had a knife,” O’Reilly intoned. He lamented that people accosted on streets have no legal way of protecting themselves. And the self-proclaimed “Culture Warrior” invoked a counterculture icon.

“I’m thinking of John Lennon here,” said BillO. “Poor John Lennon is signing an autograph and all of a sudden he is dead.”